The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' — Inside the Classic

Three Plots, Three Registers

Sidgwick's organizing principle is the separation of the play into three plots: the main (sentimental), the grotesque, and the fairy. This tripartite structure allows him to treat each strand's sources independently. The sentimental plot draws on romance conventions; the grotesque plot on rustic buffoonery; the fairy plot on folklore and classical myth. Sidgwick notes that 'probability is thrown to the winds; anachronism is rampant; classical figures are mixed with fairies and sixteenth-century Warwickshire peasants.' His editorial voice is precise about the play's hybrid nature, avoiding any claim that one source dominates. The excerpts show him moving from Ovid to medieval romance to popular pamphlets without forcing unity.

Robin Good-Fellow's Double Life

The Robin Good-Fellow material occupies a substantial portion of the illustrative texts. Sidgwick includes a tale where Robin helps a maid by bolting hemp and singing a 'mad song' with refrains like 'With sweet-brier, And bon-fire, And strawberry wire, And columbine.' Another episode shows Robin tricking a lecherous old uncle into consenting to a marriage, then dragging him through a pond. The compiler presents these as analogues to Puck's mischief, but the Robin of the sources is more explicitly a laborer's helper and a moral trickster. Sidgwick does not claim direct borrowing; he lets the reader see the folk tradition Shakespeare likely knew. The songs and prose narratives are printed with minimal annotation, preserving their rough texture.

Dating the Dream: Internal Evidence

Sidgwick addresses the play's date with characteristic caution. He notes that A Midsummer Night's Dream 'must have been acted before or during 1598' and that 'a more exact determination of its date can only be derived from the internal evidence supplied by allusions in the text or by metrical and general style.' He dismisses attempts to link the play to a specific aristocratic wedding as 'theorising, however interesting in other ways, does not concern and will not avail us now.' Instead, he relies on stylistic comparison, placing the play as 'the latest of the early comedies of Shakespeare,' after The Two Gentlemen of Verona but before The Merchant of Venice. This measured approach typifies his editorial stance: evidence-based, resistant to speculation.

Sidgwick's collection rewards readers who want to test Shakespeare's originality against his likely sources. The Robin Good-Fellow tales, in particular, offer a rawer, more rustic version of fairy mischief than the play's refined Puck. Readers may find it useful to read the analogues alongside the play, noting where Shakespeare transforms folk material into poetry and where he preserves its comic core. The compiler's own voice—dry, skeptical, scholarly—provides a steady guide through the thicket of possible influences.

That rainy afternoon, Sidgwick’s Sources and Analogues kept me company. I lingered on Robin Goodfellow’s household mischief, that odd, intimate blend of prank and prayer. Later, rummaging through a friend’s shelf, my fingers found a different kind of praise—quiet, domestic, gloriously plain. It felt like the same gentle, unshowy reverence, just spoken in another century’s voice. The Praise of a Godly Woman — Edition Insights waits there, patient as a well-worn page.